Cathedral of Thorns

I created a concept art of a Cathedral for my personal project "Sombra", a souls-like game. This Cathedral is home to the Goddess Gwaedraen, the Lady of Blood. In order to protect their deity, her faithful followers casted a spell to enclose the Cathedral with thorns and hold off any trespasser.

Photoshop and a Wacom Intuos

As usual, I start by working on a greyscale to focus on levels and contrast (even for pieces that later will get coloured)

The first is to create a rough sketch, then generate the general shapes with solid colours.

After that, I start adding the different grey tones to futher define the shape. Then comes the lighting, shadows and details.

For this project I only used one brush (D5 - Flat Pastel), and played around with the opacity to create seamless blends. Also played with the size for the finer details. This process makes it so that it feels more like sculpting than drawing!

For foliege and trees I used different foliage brushes to speed up the process.